Mac-Coleman

12 December 2011 –

Bumper Sticker Of The Day – Aren’t you glad your mother chose life?

I tried to laugh yesterday when I read a 1 October 2002, article from CNN:

“The Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday that a U.S. war against Iraq

would cost between $9 billion and $13 billion, according to an initial estimate

sent to the House and Senate. The report says the estimate will swing widely

depending on the size and composition of the force the U.S. may deploy to the

Persian Gulf.”

Cost estimates depend on how different accountants add them up; but, what the U.S. government actually paid out was around $845 billion. That is roughly equivalent to the cost of the President’s stimulus package in 2009. We got precious little out of either effort. I feel like I got duped into borrowing money to buy two Ferraris, was convinced I didn’t insurance, and then smashed them on successive weekends in foolhardy street races. Lest we forget, since the war started on 20 March 2003, nearly 4,500 Americans have been killed and nearly 33,000 have been wounded in the theater of operations.

The Iraq war will certainly confuse future college history majors as they regurgitate at test time the many stages of the ten-year-long conflict. What is important for these young men and women to answer competently and coldly before they become our future generation of national strategists and politicians is if the reasons declared for going to war were indeed compelling enough to commit the military instrument of national power to effect decisive change. The second thing these young Kissingers and Bismarcks need to answer is if the U.S. war strategy was sound enough to effect the desired outcome. Let me help you budding strategists.

Compelling strategic reasons for the U.S. to go to war with Iraq in 2002.

Stated Strategic Reason One: Saddam Hussein was a bad guy and needed killing.

Fact: Yup, he surely was. The world is a better place without this man who tortured and killed tens of thousands of his own countrymen and women to stay in power.

Question: But, is his bad-guy status alone a compelling U.S. strategic reason to commit military power in a full-scale conflict to get rid of him? After all, the world is full of Qadafis, Assads, and other lesser lights of evil who commit similar crimes on varying scales. Why this guy and not others?

Comment: In fact, we had contained bad guy Saddam’s expansionist and offensive activities pretty well between the Gulf War of 1991 and 11 September 2001. He was going nowhere, and his country was not to the point of uprising to throw him off. Therefore, this one point alone was not compelling enough to get rid of him with military force.

Stated Strategic Reason Two: Saddam was building atomic, chemical, and biological weapons—weapons of mass destruction, or WMD—and the delivery systems to hit US friends and allies in the region.

Fact: He was indeed pursuing these programs; but, strong, in-country investigative efforts later showed fairly conclusively that the first Gulf War in 1991 effectively stopped Saddam’s development of WMD. The remnants of his programs presented little to no military capability.

Question: Why were we fooled so badly into thinking that Saddam had such weapons of mass destruction?

Comment: The U.S. intelligence community, of which I was part during this episode, produced massive amounts of data and analytic products on this specific subject. Everything I read throughout the 80s and 90s told me that while there was no incontrovertible evidence that Saddam was indeed producing WMD, he certainly had the resources and the capability to do so, if he chose to. It also showed me that he had no moral compunction against using such weapons, demonstrated by his gassing and killing rebel Kurds in the 1980s. Finally, my readings showed clear statements of belligerence and offensive military threats to his enemies, including the United States. These were the generally accepted facts. From this, the intelligence community’s analytic effort produced two arguments, the first being the far weaker: 1) Saddam was a real and compelling threat to U.S. strategic interests in the area, and decisive action had to be taken immediately to stop that threat; 2) there was no verifiable evidence that WMD was being produced in Iraq, the dictator’s bellicose emanations to the world were for internal pumping up of his image rather than external effect, and there was no compelling threat to U.S. strategic interests that required immediate military action. The Bush administration’s neoconservative leaders chose to use the first argument as the basis of its causus belli because it suited their purposes. It reminds me of a cartoon where a seminary student was pouring through the Bible. His instructor asked him what he was doing so intently. Without looking up, the student answered that he was looking for proof to back up his preconceived notions.

Stated Strategic Reason Three: Saddam Hussein allowed Al Qaeda to train in and operate out of Iraq.

Fact: At the time of the U.S. invasion, there was little to no AL Qaeda activity, training or otherwise, in Iraq—and certainly no overt support by the Saddam regime for Al Qaeda operations against the United States. Saddam did praise Al Qaeda actions against the U.S—again for internal purposes.

Question: Why then were such dubious ties presented as a compelling reason for U.S. military action against Iraq?

Comment: Saddam and Al Qaeda both were enemies of the U.S.; but, they didn’t like each other and never played well together during recess. Saddam’s Baathist dictatorship was a secular-based power grab over a particular region and little else. He could have been espousing K-Martism as his guiding philosophy; but, his power was rooted in the effective terrorizing of his own people. Nothing new there. Al Qaeda, on the other hand, was a fundamentalist religious movement that stressed violence against secular rule of any Islamic state or people. Its stated enemies were secular dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and their supporters such as the United States and the decadent West. And, of course, Israel. States such as Saddam’s dictatorship in Iraq were far closer to being enemies than friends to Al Qaeda. A world-changing act allowed neoconservatives to strengthen the dubious connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam into a compelling reason to attack Iraq: 9/ll. Al Qaeda being under every rock in the Middle East was then the fear. It was an emotional, but fatuous, connection between AL Qaeda and Saddam’s Iraq. Any intelligence analyst who had looked at the area for more than a week dismissed the connection. But, it was a handy pile-on reason to make the case for war. Tragic and ironic is the fact that it wasn’t until after the U.S.’s invasion of Iraq and subsequent mistakes in handling the peace that the conditions were right for Al Qaeda to spread its tentacles into Iraq and attack U.S. forces.

Not one of these reasons eventually proved to be compelling enough to use the U.S.’s military instrument of national power to effect decisive change. Now, the administration’s spin meisters are asking if the Iraq War was a “dumb” war. That is not the adjective to use around anyone who ever served there. It probably was an unnecessary war. Therefore, all reasons to double down and “win” the various mutations that followed the initial conflict probably have been just as unnecessary—as compellingly as they may have been presented to the U.S. public. All victories claimed also are somewhat meaningless. The President’s year-end pull-out of troops, therefore, cannot be spun into some courageous move to end Bush’s War. In fact, the Iraqi government refused to accept the latest proposed Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) governing the actions of U.S. forces in Iraq. Anyone who has ever served in the military overseas knows that without a SOFA, U.S. troops simply cannot operate. We didn’t leave. The Iraqis threw us out. We shouldn’t spin the end of the war any more than we should have spun the start of the war.